Upon the Rock, Against the Gates (Proper 16A)

Upon the Rock, Against the Gates

21 August 2011

Proper 16A

Beijing China

Exod. 1:8- 2:10; Psalm 124;  Rom. 12:1-8; Matt. 16:13-20

When Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" And they said, "Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets." He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?" Simon Peter answered, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." And Jesus answered him, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.  Matt. 16:13-20

Today’s Gospel tells about Jesus giving Peter a new name and what are called “the keys of the kingdom.”  In popular imagination, that means Peter has become the doorkeeper of heaven:

Bill Gates dies.  When he gets to the Pearly Gates, there is a long line of people waiting to be interviewed by St. Peter before he’ll let them in.  He goes up to the front of the line and waits on the side close to St. Peter, who turns to him and asks him if there is anything he can do for him.  “I’m Bill Gates.  I was one of the richest men in the world and gave hundreds of millions of dollars for projects to help the disadvantaged and stop malaria.  Can’t you get me around this long, long line?”  St. Peter replies, “Oh no, no.  This is heaven’s door.  All are equal in the sight of God.  There are no favorites here, and certainly neither rich nor poor.  You must go and stand in the line and wait your turn like everybody else, Mr. Gates.”  After what seems an eternity, he is only half way up the line when from the rear comes a commotion, “Make way, make way for the Archbishop!”  At that a man in a cope and miter, attended by several fawning assistants, quickly goes to the head of the line, where St. Peter stops his current interview, talks to the Archbishop briefly, and then admits him without further ado.  Bill Gates asks the woman in front of him to hold his place in the line, and somewhat self-righteously goes back up to confront the Saint.  “Yes, Mr. Gates?” says Peter.  “I thought you said ‘there are no favorites here’ and ‘all are alike in the sight of God.’”  “Yes, that’s true, and your question is… ?”   “What about that guy in the funny hat with the gold shepherd’s crook?  He cut the line and you let him.  That’s not fair.”  St. Peter, with a look of sudden recognition on his face replies, shaking his head, “Oh no!  But he was an archbishop! It’s been a thousand years since we’ve had one of those get in up here!”

 

 
Despite the popular image of Peter as the heavenly doorkeeper, that image is not what today’s Gospel is about.  

The scene takes place in Gentile territory, near the city Caesarea Philippi,  or “Herod Philip’s City named for Augustus Caesar,” as opposed to Herod’s great capital, Caesarea Maritima, or “the City named for Caesar on the Coast.”  Philip’s Caesarea was in the foothills of Mount Hermon, a great peak in what we now call the Golan Heights.  It was originally called “Panea” or the City of Pan, and is now in Arabic called Banias.  

 A Greek Shepherd pursued by Pan, in a Red-figured Greek Vase.

It was a center of worship of the Greek god Pan, half man half goat.  Pan was a nature and fertility deity, usually represented in a state of sexual excitement and playing reed pipes.  The rituals associated with the cult involved drunken orgiastic rites on occasion using, well, ... goats.    The Temple of Pan was located at the mouth of a large cave from which then flowed a spring that was the headwaters of the River Jordan.  The cave’s mouth is in a large face of exposed bedrock, upon which the Temple of Pan was built.  The cave opening looks like a spooky gate in a city wall, leading to the underworld.  That’s probably exactly the reason that people placed Pan’s Temple there.  

 The Ruins of the Temple of Pan beside the cave mouth now called the "Gates of Hell," Banias, Golan Heights.  

The scene in the Gospel is striking—Jesus takes his closest followers, most of them in their twenties, with him on a day trip to a place that later Rabbis would rule as totally off-limits for followers of God, a place seen as “Sin City.” Maybe Galilean Jews like Jesus and his followers had a saying,  “What you do in Caesarea stays in Caesarea.”  

It is here that Jesus asks his followers, “Who do people say I am,” and “Who do you say I am?” 

It is Simon who replies, “You are the Messiah.  The Son of the Living God.” 

Jesus replies by telling Simon that his recognition of Jesus’ identity did not come from publicly available data, but rather from God speaking in his heart and mind.   

And then he turns the tables.  He tells Simon who he thinks he is.  He gives him a new name:  Rock.  In the Aramaic they would have been speaking, the word is Qepha’.  It is where the name Cephas, one of the Greek names for Peter in the New Testament, comes from.    When you translate Qepha’ into Greek rather than just transliterate it as Cephas, it becomes Petros, our familiar name Peter. 

The rock image used in the name is significant for two reasons.  In the Hebrew Scriptures, the Rock of Israel, the one reliable thing they can cling to when all else fails or fades, is God himself.  It is also the place where God puts you when he wants you safe, “the rock that is higher” than the turmoil you see about you.  It is also the stony, hard facts of life in the desert, from which God can make water spring. 

So he is reminding Simon of the source of his knowledge and of his strength. 

But “rock” also evokes the solid and reliable foundation of the house built by a wise man in the parable of Jesus, as opposed to the foolish man’s foundation of sand.  As an image it stands in polar opposition to the stony façade upon which the Temple of Pan, standing there in front of them. 

“You are Rock, and upon this Rock I will build my Church.”  The Greek here uses two different words, one masculine (petros “stone”) and one feminine (petra “massive outcropping of bedrock”).  But again, in the Aramaic Jesus would have been speaking, there is only one word—Qepha’. 

Now Roman Catholics have traditionally differed in their interpretation of this verse from Eastern Orthodox and Protestant Christians.  Rome has always insisted that it is the person of Peter, and the role he plays (the “Petrine Office”) in the Church that is the foundation stone Jesus refers to.  For them, it is the Roman Papacy.  They link it to Peter later becoming Bishop of Rome and say that it is the role of the Bishop of Rome as the leader of all the other Bishops, increasingly monarchic over the centuries, that is at issue.   Predictably, Protestants have always the “Rock” at issue is faith alone, apart from works—the confession of Jesus as Messiah and Son of God made by Peter in the story—that is the bedrock of the Church.   The Eastern Orthodox have generally said that the Rock is divine revelation, the act of God making Jesus’ identity known  (“flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but my Father in Heaven”). 

The fact that Jesus here follows his play on words with an immediate statement of Church authority (“what you bind on earth, God will bind, what you loose, God will loose”) and ultimate success (“the gates of Hell shall not prevail against you”) has lead most modern scholars from all these traditions to agree that the story in Matthew is indeed about the leading role of Peter in the early Church rather than later papal presumptions, salvation through works alone, or Eastern Christian mysticism.  

Within three decades of Jesus’ death, Christians were divided between Jewish congregations who saw James the Brother of Jesus as the natural heir to Jesus as leader and wholly gentile congregations who saw Paul, the missionary who had converted them, in this role.  Matthew’s story here is, as it were, taking the “compromise candidate” for Church leader.  Rather than either of the favorites of the two major parties in the early church, Matthew’s source says it is Peter.  James came to believe in Jesus only after the resurrection, and the Jewish communities he led wanted to turn gentile converts into Jews of one kind or another; Paul became a Christian long after Jesus death, only after an infamous career of persecuting the followers of Jesus and then seemed to go to the polar opposite extreme by insisting that his Gentile converts not observe Jewish Law.  Peter, however, was the one who was personally close to Jesus during his lifetime,  was the leader of the inner circle of the Twelve that spent the most time with Jesus, and was a Jew who came to accept and even embrace the outreach of this originally strange sect of Judaism to non-Jews and non-observers of Jewish Law.

 “You are Rock, and upon this Rock I will build my Church.”  From all the other stories we read in the New Testament, this “Rock” was not all that solid to begin with.  “Rocky” might be a better way of describing his impetuousness, and extremes in devotion followed by extremes in failure.  In Mark’s version of this story, immediately after the confession of Peter, Jesus does not give him the keys to the kingdom, but rather criticizes him for not accepting his prediction of the coming passion and scolds him and says, “Get behind me, Satan!”  (Mark 8:27-30; 31-33).   Elsewhere, we read of Peter’s silly reaction to the marvelous epiphany on the Mount of Transfiguration.  We elsewhere see him walking on water through faith and then, faith faltering,  sinking into the waves.  We see him sleeping through Jesus' prayers at Gethsemane, and then denying Jesus three times during the Passion.  But finally, after Jesus has appeared to the women, Peter is the first male disciple (at that misogynistic time, the first legally acceptable witness) to see the Risen Lord.  One of the earliest fragments of early Christian tradition found in the New Testament is preserved in St. Paul’s formulaic recitation, “For I passed on to you what was first passed on to me, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised again on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared, first to Cephas and the Twelve, . . . then to James and the apostles” (1 Cor. 15: 3-7).

So the name “Rock” reminds Simon of who it is that is his rock.  It is this connection that gives authority and power to Simon’s (Peter’s, Rock’s) ministry. “I will give you the keys of the kingdom.”   The image of keys that open irrevocably or close definitively is take from a series of passages in the Hebrew Scriptures and Intertestamental literature.  The idea is that Peter’s actions will be definitive and reflect the will of God (cf. Isa 22:22, 23; Job 12:14; 1 Enoch 1-16).    

“What you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, what you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”  This is a passive construction and euphemism for “What you declare as binding, God will bind.  What you declare as loosened, God will loose.”   So in Matthew’s view, it is Peter’s ruling on the terms and conditions of gentile entry into the Church that take priority over Paul’s or James’, and this because Peter’s rock was God himself, as shown by his early confession of Jesus as Messiah and Son of God.  

The Church built on this Rock, says Jesus, will be able to defeat even the “Gates of Hell.”   The image is a common Old Testament image for death itself (Isa 38:10; Job 38:17;  Psa 9:14;  Wis 16:13).    

But set here in Caesarea Philippi, the reference could also be a image of the Church’s attack on and defeat of the evils of the world, as represented by the Temple of Pan build on the rocky outcrop sitting beside the mouth of the cave containing Pan’s Spring.  Gates were traditionally a symbol of defensive military action, not attack.  So here Peter’s rock-based witness and ministry and the Church founded upon that rock are seen as a vanguard in an effort to reclaim this enemy-occupied territory we call our world.    Based on the Rock of our Salvation, we simply cannot be defeated by the horrors of the world we see before us, including sick religion and death itself.    

All of us, in a way, are like Simon standing with Jesus in Caesarea Philippi.  What we see in front of us is not all there is.  What we see with our eyes and handle with our hands do not tell us who Jesus is, or who we ourselves truly are.  And Jesus is asking us, even today, “Who do people say I am? And who do you say I am?”  He is offering us new names and true identities, the authentic names and selves we were created for but which we have wandered far from.

Faith is trust in unseen truth, and looks beyond the visible, beyond the temptations and distractions around us, beyond the Temple of Pan, the Gates of Hell, and beyond the messed up lives we see about us and which we lead.  It looks even beyond suffering and Death.  If we rely on our Rock, and build upon the firm foundation of Jesus Himself, then our unstable, unsteady selves, our “rocky” selves, will be transformed.  And together, as community in Him as He is in community with the Father, we will be unstoppable in charging up the rocky slope, breaking down the gates of Hell and Death, and changing ourselves and the world.   

In the name of Christ, Amen.